Really disheartened they feel they need to point out "As we move towards a new era, in which AI is playing a transformative role". Fully expecting more AI "freemium" garbage to be shoveled into products where I don't want it. Again.
I recently found the Zed editor that looked very nice but I uninstalled it the moment I saw it had a GPT-4 console. I want nothing to do with AI. I want to do things with my own mind, the help of other human beings, and I'll try my best not to support AI even though it's encroaching on everything.
I remember when as a young programmer I was fiercely against autocomplete because it impacted my ability to memorize my code.
Now I'm at the stage where I'd prefer to just think at an architectural level and let all of the tedium be abstracted away. Copilot is like autocomplete on crack and I love it.
tbf I still don't use autocomplete. It's mostly man pages (or their language specific equivalents) and stackoverflow for me. That said, I don't program anything terribly complex.
My strong belief is that autocomplete encourages the use of more descriptive identifier names and therefore is one factor that can encourage more readable and maintainable code.
But I'm certainly not the world's most ultimate programmer.
I agree, I only program via punchcards. The mere thought of compilation makes my skin crawl, but the introduction of garbage collection was really the last straw.
It’s really telling that anti-Copilot-et-al comments quite often eschew talking about the functional drawbacks and instead focus on some flavour of weird self-congratulatory elitist sentiment.
I wonder if in the future there will be some kind of demand for artisinal/hand-crafted/organic code written by someone using "their own mind". Maybe then all these anti-AI devs can corner the market.
To me it's just feels a really dumb hill to die on. Copilot has definitely removed a lot of the tedious work in my day to day.
Computers are the worst and should be treated with nothing but disdain and trepidation. Just talk with anyone who has worked with computers for more than an hour.
* Computers and other automations never made creative decisions before and were perfect for automating mechanical, rote tasks. Like going through a column of numbers and summing them up, or resizing a folder full of images
* AI attempts to make decisions that we would otherwise make creatively: yes, it may not be truly intelligent, but it undeniably makes decisions that, IF we made them, we would use part of our creative brains
That is the FUNDAMENTAL distinction between AI and other forms of computing: AI, while not intrinsically different than other forms of computing, attempts to take over our creatively-functioning brains. That is why I am against it. Society needs creatively functioning brains to be healthy, and an amalgamation of AI with humanity will have forseen and unforseen consequences, including a subtle but significant modification of our mental operation to make us forget what it is to be truly human.
>Computers and other automations never made creative decisions before
Oh they absolutely did. Even the early optimizing compilers discovered new pathways and created code that surprised even their authors. The only difference is that now regular people can see and appreciate what computers create.
This is a severely limited and pedantic example. Generally, most algorithms don't operate like that and even so, their "creativity" was limited to highly technical areas of development.
attempts to take over our creatively-functioning brain
I wonder if you are underestimating the extent to which the limitations and design decisions baked into computers and software (and into analog tools before them!) have always shaped our creative processes.
For me, AI code assistants have greatly accelerated my creativity as an engineer. Because they help with boilerplate (and sometimes even have an idea worth considering) they allow me to explore more ideas in less time.
This was very apparent to me when doing the "1 billion row challenge" that folks were talking about a few weeks back. I was able to rapidly try out probably a dozen approaches before finding a well-performing one.
(Now, it must also be said that the gnarly micro-optimizations in the fastest solutions were clearly achieved "by hand." And I would also point out that ChatGPT/Copilot lead me down a few dead ends as well. But over all, a big win for me)
What's key to me about AI code assistants is that they augment my engineering work. I am still writing code, I still need to understand everything, the architecture ideas are still mine.
My biggest gripe is that they made it difficult to switch between which toolsets/targets by introducing an MRU list. Splitting them was good, but not allowing to just show all of them plus the All tests means the order is always changing and they are going to be several clicks away often.
JetBrains' AI product didn't even function at first for me. I purchased a plan, opened the pane in JetBrains and it gave me some weird error about my account. A day later, it was working but it was very bad. Would insert code all over the place, would regularly fail, and was just terrible compared to Copilot.
What's wrong to me is that Jetbrains' product quality has taken a noticeable nosedive at the same exact time they started forcing their AI assistant plugin down people's throats.
The plugin can be disabled but not uninstalled, and it attempts to reinstall itself when upgrading the IDE version. Additionally, the latest IDE version has suddenly pushed visual latency while typing into the seconds and broken syntax highlighting / error checking. The layouts now reset each single time I start the IDE, seemingly to always display the AI assistant tab.
Plus, the AI assistant is freemium, while forcing itself upon the user. After a short trial, it attempts to convert the user. It has zero respect for whether the user already has Github's copilot installed. The reset layout conspicuously removes the Copilot tab.
To top it off, the assistant plugin plain sucks and is not ready to compete with Copilot.
Intentional sabotage or not, this is by far the worst feature rollout I've ever seen in their products and it concerns me deeply about the future of Jetbrains. I've had to force downgrade to an early IDE release for now.
I've noticed this too. That AI Assistant plugin keeps popping up all the time. I gave up and wanted to use the trial, but that wasn't working, then I noticed they update the thing every 2 days or so. I finally managed to do the trial for 14 days, but now apparently it expired, even though I enabled it last week. Left them feedback that I want to uninstall it, not disable it, got an email with some Jetbrains support URL for my request. Tried to login with my normal account that has the license, it's not working - I need a different account for the support hub. Clicked see as a guest, get Oauth error, as guest access is not allowed.
What a mess. The YouTrack system is quite difficult to parse anyways, there are so many related issues and so many products that I get lost. I haven't even bothered creating an issue around this stuff because it's simply easier and faster to downgrade the product at this time. As a long-time paying customer, this entire rollout has felt insulting.
"Freemium AI crap" is 2023/2024s "Freemium cloud collaboration/storage" crap shoveled into products in the past (of the "Subscribe to the Adobe Creative Suite for $50 + your firstborn/month, and get 5GB free Adobe Cloud storage").
Comments
Really disheartened they feel they need to point out "As we move towards a new era, in which AI is playing a transformative role". Fully expecting more AI "freemium" garbage to be shoveled into products where I don't want it. Again.
I recently found the Zed editor that looked very nice but I uninstalled it the moment I saw it had a GPT-4 console. I want nothing to do with AI. I want to do things with my own mind, the help of other human beings, and I'll try my best not to support AI even though it's encroaching on everything.
I remember when as a young programmer I was fiercely against autocomplete because it impacted my ability to memorize my code.
Now I'm at the stage where I'd prefer to just think at an architectural level and let all of the tedium be abstracted away. Copilot is like autocomplete on crack and I love it.
tbf I still don't use autocomplete. It's mostly man pages (or their language specific equivalents) and stackoverflow for me. That said, I don't program anything terribly complex.
I'm curious! What's your reason?
My strong belief is that autocomplete encourages the use of more descriptive identifier names and therefore is one factor that can encourage more readable and maintainable code.
But I'm certainly not the world's most ultimate programmer.
I agree, I only program via punchcards. The mere thought of compilation makes my skin crawl, but the introduction of garbage collection was really the last straw.
It’s really telling that anti-Copilot-et-al comments quite often eschew talking about the functional drawbacks and instead focus on some flavour of weird self-congratulatory elitist sentiment.
I wonder if in the future there will be some kind of demand for artisinal/hand-crafted/organic code written by someone using "their own mind". Maybe then all these anti-AI devs can corner the market.
To me it's just feels a really dumb hill to die on. Copilot has definitely removed a lot of the tedious work in my day to day.
That's because COPILOT will remove the next generation entirely. You're just selfishly taking advantage of the transition.
That just sounds like anti computers but few decades ago
Computers are the worst and should be treated with nothing but disdain and trepidation. Just talk with anyone who has worked with computers for more than an hour.
Not exactly. There is a qualitative distinction:
* Computers and other automations never made creative decisions before and were perfect for automating mechanical, rote tasks. Like going through a column of numbers and summing them up, or resizing a folder full of images
* AI attempts to make decisions that we would otherwise make creatively: yes, it may not be truly intelligent, but it undeniably makes decisions that, IF we made them, we would use part of our creative brains
That is the FUNDAMENTAL distinction between AI and other forms of computing: AI, while not intrinsically different than other forms of computing, attempts to take over our creatively-functioning brains. That is why I am against it. Society needs creatively functioning brains to be healthy, and an amalgamation of AI with humanity will have forseen and unforseen consequences, including a subtle but significant modification of our mental operation to make us forget what it is to be truly human.
>Computers and other automations never made creative decisions before
Oh they absolutely did. Even the early optimizing compilers discovered new pathways and created code that surprised even their authors. The only difference is that now regular people can see and appreciate what computers create.
This is a severely limited and pedantic example. Generally, most algorithms don't operate like that and even so, their "creativity" was limited to highly technical areas of development.
For me, AI code assistants have greatly accelerated my creativity as an engineer. Because they help with boilerplate (and sometimes even have an idea worth considering) they allow me to explore more ideas in less time.
This was very apparent to me when doing the "1 billion row challenge" that folks were talking about a few weeks back. I was able to rapidly try out probably a dozen approaches before finding a well-performing one.
(Now, it must also be said that the gnarly micro-optimizations in the fastest solutions were clearly achieved "by hand." And I would also point out that ChatGPT/Copilot lead me down a few dead ends as well. But over all, a big win for me)
What's key to me about AI code assistants is that they augment my engineering work. I am still writing code, I still need to understand everything, the architecture ideas are still mine.
If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls.
You are Plato and I claim my $5.
We were against bonzaibuddy and other "helpful" extensions installed against our will back then too.
So? It's still on point.
We should have had more caution with computers encroaching everything back then too.
I'm already not keen on the dumbing down of the new editor UI, there is a reason I use JetBrain's products and not vscode...
My biggest gripe is that they made it difficult to switch between which toolsets/targets by introducing an MRU list. Splitting them was good, but not allowing to just show all of them plus the All tests means the order is always changing and they are going to be several clicks away often.
JetBrains' AI product didn't even function at first for me. I purchased a plan, opened the pane in JetBrains and it gave me some weird error about my account. A day later, it was working but it was very bad. Would insert code all over the place, would regularly fail, and was just terrible compared to Copilot.
I got a refund.
What’s wrong in this affirmation? Bits of "AI" are already everywhere, we’re just so used to them that we don’t even call them "AI".
What's wrong to me is that Jetbrains' product quality has taken a noticeable nosedive at the same exact time they started forcing their AI assistant plugin down people's throats.
The plugin can be disabled but not uninstalled, and it attempts to reinstall itself when upgrading the IDE version. Additionally, the latest IDE version has suddenly pushed visual latency while typing into the seconds and broken syntax highlighting / error checking. The layouts now reset each single time I start the IDE, seemingly to always display the AI assistant tab.
Plus, the AI assistant is freemium, while forcing itself upon the user. After a short trial, it attempts to convert the user. It has zero respect for whether the user already has Github's copilot installed. The reset layout conspicuously removes the Copilot tab.
To top it off, the assistant plugin plain sucks and is not ready to compete with Copilot.
Intentional sabotage or not, this is by far the worst feature rollout I've ever seen in their products and it concerns me deeply about the future of Jetbrains. I've had to force downgrade to an early IDE release for now.
I've noticed this too. That AI Assistant plugin keeps popping up all the time. I gave up and wanted to use the trial, but that wasn't working, then I noticed they update the thing every 2 days or so. I finally managed to do the trial for 14 days, but now apparently it expired, even though I enabled it last week. Left them feedback that I want to uninstall it, not disable it, got an email with some Jetbrains support URL for my request. Tried to login with my normal account that has the license, it's not working - I need a different account for the support hub. Clicked see as a guest, get Oauth error, as guest access is not allowed.
What a mess. The YouTrack system is quite difficult to parse anyways, there are so many related issues and so many products that I get lost. I haven't even bothered creating an issue around this stuff because it's simply easier and faster to downgrade the product at this time. As a long-time paying customer, this entire rollout has felt insulting.
The latest updates fix updates of the AI plug-in as far as I can tell.
Still happily using Eclipse and Netbeans, in what concerns Java development.
No AI in sight.
"Freemium AI crap" is 2023/2024s "Freemium cloud collaboration/storage" crap shoveled into products in the past (of the "Subscribe to the Adobe Creative Suite for $50 + your firstborn/month, and get 5GB free Adobe Cloud storage").
Agree with the general sentiment that the AI plugin is the worst thing IntelliJ did in a long while (similar to gradle).
Had it not been for the Android team being big Gradle fans, and it would be used as much as Grails nowadays.
Gradle isn't made by JetBrains.
neither is AI